Before trying to understand the scholarly and peer-reviewed articles, get a firm grasp of your topic with definitions, topic overviews, and information written with the learner in mind.
Whether you're looking for peer-reviewed or just credible scholarly sources, most library databases allow you to limit your search results to just these kinds of articles. Take a look at some of these databases to get started.
Remember: there's a difference between scholarly and peer-reviewed. Scholarly is a much broader category and can include books, articles, reviews, opinion pieces, and more. Peer-reviewed refers to a specific process in which an article is evaluated by scholars before it is approved for publication.
If you're working on a literature review, you need to be strategic in your searching, and have a firm understanding of your scope, research questions, inclusion criteria, and which databases or indexes are most appropriate for your topic. Here are my recommendations and favorite resources for conducting sociology-related literature reviews.
We've got many resources and tools to help with this. For quick citations, I recommend Citation Machine. For more advanced citation management, Zotero is my favorite.
